The heavy reliance on archive.today bites them

[ericbarbour]

Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website’s anonymous maintainer.

In a request for comment page, Wikipedia’s volunteer editors were presented with three options. Option A is to remove or hide all Archive.today links and add the site to the spam blacklist. Option B is to deprecate Archive.today, discouraging future link additions while keeping the existing archived links. Option C is to do nothing and maintain the status quo.

Option A in particular would be a huge change, as more than 695,000 links to Archive.today are used across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. Archive.today, also known as Archive.is, is a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

Idiots. Lazy, incompetent, lying idiots.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... ed-a-blog/

The RFC is already up to 245k bytes and still growing., filling up with spluttering by some of WP's worst insiders. And it is the FIFTH RFC discussing archive.today.....can't stop beating their hobby horses. I expect option C will win, eventually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... e.is_RFC_5

[ericbarbour]

And only 10 days later? BURN IT ALL DOWN

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... -captures/

This could lead to thousands of pages being deleted for a sudden "lack of notability". Their "free and open cyclothing" is now enslaved to news site paywalls. Nothing on the web can be relied upon to remain for any period of time.........not even WP. It is all soluble and prone to vanish with no trace left.

Plus it will only amplify their already-great dependence on archive.org, which is prone to blocking archives to paywalled links. Don't be too surprised if the Internet Archive and WMF merge into one demented and secretive online "clubhouse".

[Ognistysztorm]

And only 10 days later? BURN IT ALL DOWN

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... -captures/

This could lead to thousands of pages being deleted for a sudden "lack of notability". Their "free and open cyclothing" is now enslaved to news site paywalls. Nothing on the web can be relied upon to remain for any period of time.........not even WP. It is all soluble and prone to vanish with no trace left.

Plus it will only amplify their already-great dependence on archive.org, which is prone to blocking archives to paywalled links. Don't be too surprised if the Internet Archive and WMF merge into one demented and secretive online "clubhouse".

It's a fool's errand to trust a large-scale archive site where the owner is shady or unknown anyways. Theoretically archive.is pages can be archived in nested manners by first passing them through wikiwix.com and then finally through the Internet Archive. The same might work for passing them through megalodon.jp and then the Internet Archive.